


There Was A Boy

by Quecksilver_Eyes



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Gen, the falcon is not a falcon, which makes the whole thing so much worse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-23
Updated: 2018-03-23
Packaged: 2019-04-07 03:26:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14071896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quecksilver_Eyes/pseuds/Quecksilver_Eyes
Summary: Here is a story about a falcon, the way a boy with a stolen name and a heart full of guilt tells it to the daughter of the man who looked at the world and saw nothing but tinder to burn down:There was a boy and his father bought him a falcon for his sixth birthday. His father told him to tame the bird. Make it obedient. And the boy would spend every day with that falcon. It would scratch at him. Make him bleed. But eventually he earned its trust.Here is what the boy doesn’t say:Her soft wings are wrapped around him, her hands hovering over his broken fingers. She hums a tune, some mundane movie song he doesn’t know, a three voiced choir. He could probably play it, if he tried.





	There Was A Boy

Here is a story about a falcon, the way a boy with a stolen name and a heart full of guilt tells it to the daughter of the man who looked at the world and saw nothing but tinder to burn down:

_There was a boy and his father bought him a falcon for his sixth birthday. His father told him to tame the bird. Make it obedient. And the boy would spend every day with that falcon. It would scratch at him. Make him bleed. But eventually he earned its trust._

_He brought the bird to his father, to show him that the bird would come back to him. He thought his father would be proud. His father took the falcon and snapped its neck. The boy was devastated. But he realized his father was right. He was told to tame the bird. Not to love it._

 

* * *

 

Here is what the boy doesn’t say:

Her soft wings are wrapped around him, her hands hovering over his broken fingers. She hums a tune, some mundane movie song he doesn’t know, a three voiced choir. He could probably play it, if he tried.

Her fingers spark red, a shade brighter than his blood and the bones in his hands realign. “You shouldn’t”, he says and rubs his knuckles, now wrapped in soft, smooth skin. She cooks her head, her wings twitch. “Little boys shouldn’t get their fingers broken”, she says, without interrupting the song. He shrugs. “I’m a shadowhunter”, he says and traces the rune on his arm. She smiles and opens up her wings, folds them over her back. “Yes”, she says. “I know, love.”

 

* * *

 

When his father brings home a falcon for him to train, the boy is overjoyed, binds the bird and starts training it with all the excitement a six year old can muster. That is, until the chain is broken and a woman holds a knife to his throat, snarling. Her wings twitch and her talons dig into the ground.

“You’re a child”, she says and the hard lines on her face grow softer.

The boy says nothing.

 

* * *

 

She is a bird, when his father is around, always, flies high into the sky and ruffles her feathers. His father laughs and piano lessons resume.

In the evenings, when his father is away, when there is just him and the bird, the woman, with her wings and her talons and her feathered cheeks, she sits him down and sings, calls his father cruel. The boy shrugs. “We’re shadowhunters”, he says and she presses her lips together, as if that wasn’t explanation enough.

 

* * *

 

The first time his father breaks his fingers, a sick cracking and hot pain, he draws up a healing rune on his ribs. “So you learn your lesson”, he says. “Play.”

She holds him close to her chest that night, combs his hair with hands sparking red and sings to him, a many voiced song that she says is popular. He doesn’t recognize it.

 

* * *

 

“Why don’t you fly away?”, he asks her, when she has wrapped him in her wings, her shivering hands braiding his ever growing hair.

“I suppose it’s not worth the trouble”, she says, her wings curling around them even tighter. “And besides, who am I to leave you alone?”

 

* * *

 

(Years later, after a fire has burnt everything to the ground, he will find a pentagram drawn over the entire property, etched into the earth. “Trap the demon blood and you can trap the downworlder”, his father used to say, a smile on his face, a seraph blade in his hands.)

 

* * *

 

When his father snaps her neck, right next to the boy’s ear, and caresses his cheek in the same movement, the boy feels like all the bones his father has broken have burst open again, oozing blood on the floor, pooling at his legs.

“I love you, son”, his father says. “To love is to destroy.”

 

* * *

 

(It will be some ten years later, when the boy is bound and gagged and wet and so burnt out he feels like the wind might blow him away, that he hears the three voiced choir again, the voice that soothed his bleeding knuckles. He will lift his head, water and blood dripping to the floor, and see a winged woman, with her talons dangling just over the ground, and her hands on the bars of her cage.

He will start singing along.)


End file.
